Our world is diminished yet again: gifted author, artist and teacher Guy Davenport has died.
In 1990 he received a so-called genius grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for his short fiction and essays linking American civilization with the traditions of classical and European culture.In typical Davenport short stories, Kafka promises a little girl that her lost doll, Belinda, is actually on a trip around the world and will write to her ("Belinda's World Tour"), or there's a juxtaposition of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, Fourier's utopian New Harmony community, Leonardo's bicycle, pollinating bees, and Beckett in conversation ("Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier").
Mr. Davenport's playful explanation for his technique was, "You get up in the morning and you've got Keats' 'Odes' to take some sophomores through, and you've got a chapter of 'Ulysses' for your graduate students, and the mind gets in the habit of finding cross-references among subjects," he told an interviewer for the periodical Vort in 1976.
But critics saw the deeper point to his fiction. Hilton Kramer, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote of Davenport's conception of the short-story form: "He has given it some of the intellectual density of the learned essay, some of the lyric concision of the modern poem - some of its difficulty too - and a structure that often resembles a film documentary. The result is a tour de force that adds something new to the art of fiction."
In 1974, his story "Robot" won a third prize in the O. Henry Awards, and in 1981 he won the Morton Douwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His friends at the University of Kentucky and elsewhere will miss him.
When people are reading about the great writers of the 20th century, he'd be on the list," said Ellen Rosenman, chairwoman of the UK English department. "He was an amazing, inventive, quirky mind, just really unique."But his works were not the kind to read at the beach.
"You had to know a fair amount to know how original he was," said James Baker Hall, a retired UK English professor and former state poet laureate.
"I think he was one of the great prose stylists in the English language," Hall said. "You never could anticipate where a sentence would take you."
Mr. Davenport had a reputation for intellectual and artistic breadth.
Jack Shoemaker was Mr. Davenport's publisher for about 30 years, successively at North Point Press, Counterpoint and most recently Shoemaker and Hoard.
Shoemaker said Mr. Davenport blended his many interests "into one vision of the world" by making "incredible connections."
"He was one of the greatest prose stylists of modern American letters," Shoemaker said. "I think his work will be read in a thousand years, as long as there is English prose."
Mr. Davenport also was an artist. Erik Reece, a lecturer at UK's English department and the author of a book about Davenport's visual art, said: "He was a synthesizer of a lot of modernist styles. He was always trying new forms."
I first became aware of him when he wrote a brief euology for J.R.R. Tolkien when the professor died in 1973. I would have to scrounge to find that old, treasured photocopy, but here's a snippet of what caught the eye of my young collegiate self: Davenport in National Review(!) on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.
We can easily say that it is the best book of the century, though the greatest is Ulysses, and Lewis' The Human Age is the book we deserve most to be remembered for ... Tolkien dared to resuscitate the romance, a form requiring the genius of a Rabelais or Spenser, a form which was shattered after its brilliant flowering in the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto by the publication of Don Quixote."
So I knew immediately that he was smart and learned and a careful discriminator of different kinds of excellence - eye-opening stuff for a simple sophomore.
Along those same lines, here's something he wrote about Tolkien in 2001:
Tolkien at a turning point in his career found ancient Greek too logical and neat. He fell in love instead with the runes of the North, the almost indecipherable prehistory of Denmark and Finland, a time of chain-mailed nobility and a belief in dragons. He made an imaginary past place, Middle Earth, in which to revive the old tales, the old ways, the ancient morals that survive as English fair play, honor, and decency.When, fifty years ago, I attended Tolkien’s lectures, I realized that I was absolutely ignorant of the Far North, its Wagnerian gods and heroes. Professor Tolkien lectured to the floor, had a speech impediment, and was all too often given to wandering off into Welsh cognates. The Lord of the Rings was, for me, a redeeming gift for having learned the principal parts of Anglo-Saxon verbs, fifty every Friday. Further redemption came when I met, here in Kentucky, a classmate of Tolkien’s who told me that good old Ronald ("whatever became of him?") was deeply inquisitive about backwoods Kentuckians, who grew pipeweed and had names like Baggins and Barefoot.
There's much more, of course: short stories, essays, translations from the Greek, art. I'll be learning from Guy Davenport for a long time to come. Many thanks for making my world bigger and more interesting.
"Our understanding of the world is largely secret, limited to our kin and friends, and evaporates in the winds of time. The artist's understanding of the world is public, available to all, and can become a long-lasting resource."